I was on duty at the listening post when the anomalous messages first registered. The sender tags were obviously fake, seeing as how they contained an encoded image of a clown’s face instead of coordinates. That wasn’t the part that got to me, nor was it the actual payload, which consisted of my name repeated over and over. It wasn’t exactly a secret that I worked there; my name was listed as one of the staff on the base’s public net node. It was creepy, sure, but not unusual.
No, what got under my skin was the location of the origin node.
Okay, if you don’t know the structure of first-generation interstellar net messages from memory because, for instance, you’re a person with a life, one that doesn’t revolve around technology that’s centuries out of date, there are two ways to figure out where they come from. The first is the sender-provided identification tag, which is only useful when communicating with people other than douchebags with pictures of clown faces. The second is the diagnostic information added at each relay. Each of them has a vague idea of the direction and strength of the incoming signal, and from that they can reckon where in space it actually came from.
And this data told me that the message I had just received came from a binary solar system with no habitable planets, hundreds of light-years away from any known civilization.
I sent a reply to the indicated coordinates, expecting it to vanish off into the void. Hello, this is Sudalis Comms Outpost. Haha, you got me. Now quit messing around.
But not an hour later, I got a response from the clown.
I don’t mess around.